July 24, 2010

The following is a more casual description of a stream of thought I had about these posts I’ve been writing on the MDMA/PTSD paper.

ok, so there’s this paper that has finally come out. I’ve been bashing away at the project itself on the blog since, oh, forever. I finally had a chance to get around to blogging the paper. no biggie.
takehome message, MDMA is good for treating PTSD if given in the therapy session.
one of the features of such a study is that it is going to get media attention. I was ignoring that all week so that I could blog the paper unmolested.
Trolling around the media coverage I started on a slow burn.
Going through Google hits, there was a great deal of emphasis on PTSD caused by combat stress. Angles on the story which suggested we have a big ol’ problem looming (true dat) and won’t it be great to have some new hope (true dat) and then doing a less than complete cockup of the facts of the paper.
Problem is that it is a small study as it is, 12 MDMA-treated, 8 placebo controls, but only ONE had combat trauma as the index trauma. ONE. The rest were mostly sexual assault, crime (not further specified) and childhood trauma (sexual assault and physical neglect). Me, I was happily bashing away at the overselling of the single combat PTSD case in my draft.
On the way home it hit me.

July 24, 2010

I am disappointed in the mainstream, and not so mainstream, media coverage of the Mithoefer et al, 2010 paper on MDMA-assisted therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had been holding off reading any of it because I suspected it might distract me from actually discussing the paper.
After writing up my thoughts on the paper, I went strolling around the Google News hits for MDMA to see what had been written about this paper. There was a whole lot of of really bad journalism. Sure, for the most part they got the basic facts right, but I noticed a consistent issue having to do (I assume) with journalism’s penchant for selling a story they’d like to tell over the story that exists.
Let us start with the more venerable news organizations.ABC News Ecstasy may help traumatised veterans
See the title? Pretty common to see something abut veterans or combat PTSD in the title as well as in the article body.

found that the drug seems to improve the effects of therapy in military veterans

No, there was one combat stress case. I noted that this stuck out as odd in my post on the paper. Well, now you can see why the authors might have been so keen to include this single warfighter subject. They enjoyed much wider press and nobody called them out for this scientific distraction
(This part of the ABC report caused me to laugh though:

The researchers, led by Dr Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

Of course this is true, the driving force behind getting these studies rolling is the recreational legalization Trojan outfit MAPS. It looks better though, if you ask me, when they credit the therapist Mithoefer as being the leader of the project and MAPS as only providing support and assistance. )